DrewWilson
November 25th, 2008, 04:20 PM
The Robotic Musicianship Group at Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology just blew our minds with some videos depicting robots playing music with real people. Great, you say. Some fake robot machine can, like, bang around on a drum or something. Not so fast, doubters.
These robots, developed with funding from the National Science Foundation, listen to humans creating music in real time and play along with them. One might say they improvise.
They can't pass the actual Turing test, in which a robot must fool a human into thinking it is also a human during a conversation.
But musical improvisation is another kind of a conversation and I, a human, would believe that the impromptu, non-predetermined parts these robots play were played by other humans. By that standard, the Georgia Tech team's robots have already passed the musical Turing test (assuming that I'd feel the same way if I were playing along instead of watching the robots in a video, and I'm fairly certain I would).
We asked professor Gil Weinberg, head of the program, how these robots manage to parse what humans are playing, and how they manage to play along. How do they figure out which parts to play? As it turns out, the process is somewhat analogous to the way Deep Blue plays chess: by carefully examining its options and then evolving them like biological species to see which one best fits a changing musical environment.
More... (http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/11/no-way-robot-ja.html#more)
These robots, developed with funding from the National Science Foundation, listen to humans creating music in real time and play along with them. One might say they improvise.
They can't pass the actual Turing test, in which a robot must fool a human into thinking it is also a human during a conversation.
But musical improvisation is another kind of a conversation and I, a human, would believe that the impromptu, non-predetermined parts these robots play were played by other humans. By that standard, the Georgia Tech team's robots have already passed the musical Turing test (assuming that I'd feel the same way if I were playing along instead of watching the robots in a video, and I'm fairly certain I would).
We asked professor Gil Weinberg, head of the program, how these robots manage to parse what humans are playing, and how they manage to play along. How do they figure out which parts to play? As it turns out, the process is somewhat analogous to the way Deep Blue plays chess: by carefully examining its options and then evolving them like biological species to see which one best fits a changing musical environment.
More... (http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/11/no-way-robot-ja.html#more)